Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 08:23:01 -0700 From: the_dojang-request@martialartsresource.net Subject: The_Dojang digest, Vol 10 #214 - 8 msgs X-Mailer: Mailman v2.0.13.cisto1 MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Errors-To: the_dojang-admin@martialartsresource.net X-BeenThere: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.13.cisto1 Precedence: bulk Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net X-Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net X-Subscribed-Address: kma@martialartsresource.com List-Id: The Internet's premier discussion forum on Korean Martial Arts. List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Unsubscribe: , List-Help: Status: O X-Status: X-Keywords: Send The_Dojang mailing list submissions to the_dojang@martialartsresource.net To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://martialartsresource.net/mailman/listinfo/the_dojang or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to the_dojang-request@martialartsresource.net You can reach the person managing the list at the_dojang-admin@martialartsresource.net When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of The_Dojang digest..." <<------------------ The_Dojang mailing list ------------------>> Serving the Internet since June 1994. Copyright 1994-2003: Ray Terry and Martial Arts Resource The Internet's premier discussion forum devoted to Korean Martial Arts. 1400 members. See the Korean Martial Arts (KMA) FAQ and the online search engine for back issues of The_Dojang at http://MartialArtsResource.com Pil Seung! Today's Topics: 1. Congratulations to Dr. Tavassoli (Charles Richards) 2. Kyuck Pa (Charles Richards) 3. Breaking of balence (Todd Miller) 4. No more fear (Burdick, Dakin R) 5. Languages and manuals (Burdick, Dakin R) 6. =?iso-8859-1?Q?Re:_Thoughts_on_Conflict?= (bsims@midwesthapkido.com) 7. =?iso-8859-1?Q?Re:_Raising_a_Very_important_question?= (bsims@midwesthapkido.com) 8. Re: Clarification (Kent Frazier) --__--__-- Message: 1 Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 05:31:52 -0700 (PDT) From: Charles Richards To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Subject: [The_Dojang] Congratulations to Dr. Tavassoli Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Congratulations to Dr. Tavassoli! Pen and sword in accord... I have great respect for the good doctor. I really enjoyed his session in Jackson in March. Yours in Jung Do, Charles Richards www.mojakwan.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. http://search.yahoo.com --__--__-- Message: 2 Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 05:55:38 -0700 (PDT) From: Charles Richards To: Dojang Digest Subject: [The_Dojang] Kyuck Pa Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Dear Sa Ja Nim Timmerman, Kamsa Hamnida! My students are pumped! Thursday, we did some breaking during class to get ready for a fund raiser Break-A-Thon on Saturday. My student Rodney (who you met in Jackson, he was Orange Belt) and my 4th Gup adult male will be breaking one brick with palm strike Saturday. What's really exciting is that I was able to get everybody in class that night including my 9 year old girl white belt and her mom (white belt also) to break with "soft style" palm strike. But the icing on the cake was seeing my wife break and the look of pleasant surprise and newfound confidence on her face. She'll be testing for Green Belt the 27th, 1 day before her birthday. OK, I'm rambling, but we all got really pumped doing about 30 minutes of breaking last night. Yours in Jung Do, Charles Richards www.mojakwan.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. http://search.yahoo.com --__--__-- Message: 3 Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 09:27:24 -0400 From: Todd Miller To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Subject: [The_Dojang] Breaking of balence Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net The Korean term for Breaking the opponents balence -Munoturiki. Joong Shim Japki - to keep your balence. Hope this helps Master Todd Miller Korea Jungki Hapkido & Guhapdo Assc. --__--__-- Message: 4 Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 08:40:58 -0500 From: "Burdick, Dakin R" To: Subject: [The_Dojang] No more fear Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Eric Walker writes: >The suburban neighborhood I grew up in turned out its fair share of whackos. Why haven't I become the victim of one of these nuts so far? Why does someone else become the victim? Perhaps I am communicating something about myself in an unconscious fashion as I walk through my life. Is it Warrior Spirit that I'm getting at? Can this be instilled in someone? Or does it come with heredity? I think that both environment and heredity play a role, but what you seem to be getting at is the process that criminals use to select their victims. Steve Thompson at the University of Michigan has done a LOT of research on this. You might check out his book "No More Fear," Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 2nd edition (June 1993), ASIN: 0840344503. Yours in the arts, Dakin dakinburdick@yahoo.com --__--__-- Message: 5 Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 08:47:36 -0500 From: "Burdick, Dakin R" To: Subject: [The_Dojang] Languages and manuals Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Jere Hilland wrote: >You stated that you are going to name the techniques in Korean, Japanese and English (possibly Chinese). That is going to be a chore. I have the terminology in English and English-edized Korean and I am in the process of typing the Hangul. But I must confess that I can't type in Hangul as fast as English and it is taking a lot longer than I thought. That is going to be a chore, doing the translation in Hangul, Kanji and what are the Chinese ideograms called? Zhongwen? Well, I'm not putting them into hangul, kanji, hiragana, katakana, and the like (kanji is the Japanese name for Chinese characters). I will have instructions on how to read and write hangul, but I'm just romanizing the terms (in modified Hepburn style for Japanese, Wade-Giles for Korean, and Pinyin for Chinese). And yes, it will be quite a chore! I've got about 20 Korean and Chinese and Japanese dictionaries up on my shelf for when I go diving for terminology, but when I'm in the mood, it is a blast and I learn a lot. I already put my pressure point list into all three languages, although identifying the same points in the three languages was difficult because there are several acupuncture systems and the numbering on the head points often changes. I think language instruction is very important in the martial arts, and really try to get my students to work on it. For example, when we count in kid's tkd, we teach them Korean numbers, then Japanese, then Chinese, then Spanish, then French, then German (which sounds very commanding!), then Italian, and then move on from there. Swahili sounds pretty good too! I keep forgetting the Russian and I never got the Indonesian down very well. But the kids love it! Take care, Dakin dakinburdick@yahoo.com --__--__-- Message: 6 Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 08:51:36 -0500 (CDT) From: To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Subject: [The_Dojang] =?iso-8859-1?Q?Re:_Thoughts_on_Conflict?= Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Dear Eric: ".....The suburban neighborhood I grew up in turned out its fair share of whackos. Why haven't I become the victim of one of these nuts so far? Why does someone else become the victim? Perhaps I am communicating something about myself in an unconscious fashion as I walk through my life......" In DOCHANG JOURNAL (Level 4) I address the matter of the nature of conflict and perhaps I can speak to the issues you mention using that model here. You are absolutely right to believe that there are a lot of "whackos" in our society but the matter of being attacked by someone is a bit more complicated than just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The matter of being involved in a conflict can be broken into roughly 4 stages. Stage One: Pre-disposing Conditions. The person who decides to conflict with another does not usually wake-up and make a decision to do so. Mental illness, a bad day at work, violent childhood, reduced judgement or impulse control, involvement in other conflicts (the list can go on and on) can produce or contribute to a person being disposed towards. Common to these conditions, Eric, is the belief that one sees themselves as "one-down" and decides to even up the situation by taking what they need or causing others to feel as bad as the attacker feels. Stage Two: Target Acquisition. This is the area where most self-defense courses start, and probably is a great deal of what you are addressing. The attacker is going to single out a "target" who has communicated to the attacker the greatest chance of successfully achieving the attackers' goal. Ever wonder why terrorists go after civilian targets rather than fight pitched battles with the military? Ever wonder why there are no serial killers who rape and murder Delta Force members? Body language, situations of disadvantage, obvious handicaps and so forth indicate to the attacker that they have a greater chance of success in making their selected target miserable with less inconvenience to the attacker. Stage Three: Challenge. Most fights are not fights in the strict sense. Rather the attacker has to confirm that they have selected the right choice. This might be something as simple as a verbal assault, a push or shove, snatch-&-run. It could even be a flurry of punches that wind-up in a tussle on the ground. Not a few conflicts end with this because the attacker finds out that he picked someone who is more trouble than they are worth. I say again, these are not fights in a strict sense. Stage Four: Total Commitment. Most modern MA train for the previous stage and most failures of such training is when conflicts hit stage four. You know stage four situations when attackers report later that they don't remember anything--- "I just saw red". Observers of such conflicts usually report that it took a legitimate effort to pull "the crazy man off the other guy". Actual fights wind-up in the emergency room because the attacker no longer has any self-regulating restraint on how much damage he will do to his victim. As much as MA talk about addressing real fights, the overwhelming majority of MA training is not scaled towards tthis kind of conflict. Thats why most of the time you only read about such training in organizations which have a high probability of facing lethal situations on a regular basis such as the military and para-military organizations (IE. police; border patrol, etc.). I believe this is also why most police and military disparage the typical MA school as being useless for their purposes. Finally, I beleive this is the biggest reason that most MA practitioners report failure of their training when they needed it the most. Training for this sort of conflict is not something that goes over well in a commercial dochang and must actually be a personal decision one makes in their own training. Of course, when you take this approach in a commercial school you run the risk of being identified as being too serious- -- or "wound too tight". I have often wondered (to myself) how these very serious (read also "dedicated") manage to survive in schools where other people come to walk a "big circle" around them. I'll save that for another discussion. I hope this has been of some help. Best Wishes, Bruce --__--__-- Message: 7 Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 09:30:11 -0500 (CDT) From: To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Subject: [The_Dojang] =?iso-8859-1?Q?Re:_Raising_a_Very_important_question?= Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Dear Dakin: I had a hard time reading the balance of your letter after being hit between the eyes by your question. "If a culture has an activity that nobody practices, is it still a tradition." I know, I know. It sounds like that Zen koan: "If a leaf falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it....etc." but I think it is a very important question. At one time here in the States people hunted their food on a daily basis with flintlocks. In fact today there are still Black Powder enthusiasts who hunt and some still occasionally use a flintlock albeit as hobbyists. If noone used Black powder for, say, two hundred years and then read FOXFIRE (vol 5, I think) and built a flintlock of their own would this still be an American tradition? Korean pottery was once famous throughout the Pacific Rim for generations. If someone were to find a scroll and resurrect the recipes for fabricating such pottery again would this still be a tradition? How about even farther back? There is a growing interest in Archeology regarding the method for fabriacting stone tools. We don't have any real use for stone tools in our modern world, and have scant ideas of how such tools were made (though people can make educated guesses). Can making stone tools be considered a tradition? I want you to know, Dakin, this is not simple rhetoric. I think you raised an important question that people often sidestep. Looking through the magazines and telephone books the word "tradition" gets invoked an awful lot to authenticate what people are doing and offering. GM Lee invokes "tradition" to authenticate his organization and art going back (by his report) 59 generations. I, in my way, have spoken for a greater interest in Chinese influences to lend greater balance to the practice of Korean "traditions". Pelligrini by his own admission does not teach Hapkido, but seems to invoke Korean tradition by using the term "hapkido" in his marketing. Your thought seems to ask a couple of questions. 1.) Must a tradition be an unbroken line of practice? Does the tradition end the first time people stop doing it or must there be a significant amount of time? 2.) If someone restarts a practice that has not been done for a while is this a "reconstructed" OLD tradition, or a New tradition in and of itself? I would love to hear peoples' thoughts on this because I think it speaks to many of the discussions we have here on the Net. Best Wishes, Bruce --__--__-- Message: 8 Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 08:04:19 -0700 (PDT) From: Kent Frazier To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Subject: [The_Dojang] Re: Clarification Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Dear Bruce: Thanks for the interesting and well-thought-out response. I think I understand much better your stance and your reasons for it now. As far as the questions you raised, I think I can take a stab at them, though it may be pure postulation. Obviously it is incorrect to say that Korean martial tradition is 100% Japanese. If this were the case, the martial arts of Korea would virtually indistinguishable from those of Japan. However, I think the reason that so many people put such an emphasis on the Japanese side of the KMA is because the Japanese arts are the most recent, and in most cases, the largest influence on the Korean martial tradition. True, there are indigenous Korean arts just as Ssireum and TaeKyon, but these arts were essentially grafted into Japanese styles to create a Korean hybrid style. This is especially prominent in Taekwondo, where most of the founders of the Kwans studied Japanese Karate extensively. I am perhaps speaking from a stilted viewpoint here, as our Chung Do Kwan is very Japanese in nature, we have even gone so far as to continue to use many of the Japanese terms. Lee Won Kuk may have even been looked upon badly as a Japanese sympathizer, though I have read conflicting stories about much of that period. However, despite the Japanese influence on the Chung Do Kwan and many of its ilk, there are indeed some styles that emphasize the Chinese side of things more, and for them, i would indeed say that going back to Chinese roots and forms would probably be at least as traditional as going back to Japan or Okinawa. For those of us in very Japanese styles, it makes much more sense for us to go back to the Japanese and Okinawan roots. I don't know as much about Hapkido, but I would assume that it is much the same way there. At least part of Hapkido is based in Choi Yong Sool's (gee I hope I didn't just make an ass of myself and get the name wrong) study of Daito-ryu Aiki-jiujutsu. At the sime time, as I understand it, there are also styles of Hapkido that try to draw more from Chinese influence. So I would guess it is very similar in many ways to the Taekwondo situation. Not sure if any of that was helpful or even intelligable. My capability to carry a thought to completion has severely diminished since I have been here in Austria. Can't wait to get back to the States, hopefully that will clear things up a bit. Right now, I manage to be just as verbose as normal (and that's pretty damn verbose,) but without saying half as much as I would have normally. Bah. Anyway, best wishes to you too, Bruce Thanks for the response, Kent Oh, and regarding "Lethalo," how could anyone even CONSIDER taking it seriously. Anyone who would name something Lethalo is obviously not someone I would want any sort of association with. I would be embarrassed just to say I studied something with such a rediculous name. It sounds like the kind of name a second grader would make up, and not a very bright one at that. ------------------- Original Message: Message: 4 Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 13:07:12 -0500 (CDT) From: To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Subject: [The_Dojang] =?iso-8859-1?Q?Re:Clarification_?= Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Dear Kent: It was great to hear from you again, especially if the comments you made about my views are shared by a large number of other folks. Let me see if I can adjust things a bit here. First off, I don't know that I have any "objections" to using Japanese traditions. Its not as though I have some deep-seated grudge against the Japanese culture. I think what I am advocating is greater balance in this matter. I have been in discussions where people have gone so far as to say that Korean has no martial traditions except what they got from Japan and that all of any other traditions died out well before the Japanese Occupation. Thats just not true and the MYTBTJ that I am so fond of citing is only one of a number of books that crop up in Korean history and speak to their traditions. Korea has its own traditions and most of everything else was borrowed from Japan and China. Thats fine. I honestly don't have an issue with this. I just can't figure why the emphasis from most pratitioners of Korean arts is always on the Japanese side. Japanese have swordsmanship, but then, so did the Chinese. Both cultures have stick, spear, staff, truncheon, empty-hand grappling and so forth. Both cultures have forms/kata/hyung but the emphasis always seems to fall on the Japanese side of the house. I'll say it again-- its not that I have some grudge against Japanese culture. I simply don't understand why the KMA --- and the Koreans themselves would rather eschew connections with Chinese traditions and cling to the Japanese stuff. I even noticed that some of our more serious kata people are backing up to Okinawa to get more authentic material. Why not back up to the animal styles of Southern China if you are going to do that? Gawd knows, I can make a place for Japanese influence in my practice. The hyung of Yon Mu Kwan are heavily influenced by TKD and in turn back to Japanese Karate. But wouldn't it only be reasonable to include material from the Chinese side to keep a balanced representation of the origins of KMA? Its not that it would then be MORE traditional, but at least it would be AS traditional, yes? Best Wishes, Bruce --__--__-- _______________________________________________ The_Dojang mailing list The_Dojang@martialartsresource.net http://martialartsresource.net/mailman/listinfo/the_dojang http://the-dojang.net It's a great day for Taekwondo! Support the USTU by joining today. US Taekwondo Union, 1 Olympic Plaza, 104C, Colorado Spgs, CO 80909 719.866.4632 FAX 719.866.4642 ustugold@mailsnare.net www.ustu.org Old digest issues available @ ftp://ftp.martialartsresource.com Copyright 1994-2003: Ray Terry and http://MartialArtsResource.com Standard disclaimers apply. Remember 9-11! End of The_Dojang Digest